Category: Rare

In November this year, Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Phillipines leaving millions homeless and in need of medical attention. As with previous disasters, the British photographer Stephen Gill has released a fundrasing print, the proceeds from which will go to the Red Cross. This image is from his latest series Best Before End, where images have been processed in the presence of various energy drinks which distort the final image. The 12×10 inch print comes in an edition of 100 and is £68. In addition (subject to availability) Stephen is including a saddle stitched newspaper entitled Not In Service with every order. This was published on the occasion of Gill’s retrospective at Foam gallery in Amsterdam earlier this year. The 28 page paper contains images from many of his projects including Talking to Ants, Off Ground, Hackney Wick, Best Before End, Hammer and Blackberry, Hackney Flowers, A Series of Disappointments, Trolley Portraits and Billboards. These papers are not for sale, they are only distributed with purchases from his website, Nobody Books, making them highly collectible in their own right.

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Last week saw the opening of the latest exhibition at Tate Modern, William Klein + Daido Moriyama. Both photographers are renowned for their gritty depiction of urban life on the streets of New York and Tokyo; in this exhibition the similarities in their approach to documenting the city are explored in great detail through works that cover the 50’s to the present day. A particular focus of the Moriyama section, is the artists relationship with publishing. He is a prolific producer of books, producing over 85 books and magazines during his career, some of which have become highly collectible.

To coincide with the show, Moriyama recreated his 1974 Printing Show in conjunction with Goliga and Tate Modern. In the original show, Moriyama set up a wall of images taken during a visit to New York and a bank of photocopiers. Visitors were then allowed to select images that would then be printed and bound in to a unique book entitled Another Country in New York. For this show, entitled Menu, Moriyama mounted 60 double-page spreads on the walls of the East Room at Tate Modern and allowed ticket holders to select 20 of these images, in whichever order they wanted, which were then bound inside a silkscreened cover (choice of two covers, created during the event). Moriyama was also on hand to sign the finished book. The whole process created a totally unique book, I would be amazed if any two books were the same!

The welcome sign

The wall of images

The tough job of making your selection!

Silkscreening of the book covers

One of the silkscreens

The two book cover options

Where the book was assembled

Daido Moriyama signing the finished product

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This book was produced in collaboration with Matthew Barney to accompany the 2007 exhibition of the Goetz collection of Barney’s work. In this exhibition the Cremaster Cycle was presented as a soundscape installation where all five films were played at the same time in close proximity as an immersive experience. In addition, his latest work (at the time) Drawing Restraint 9 was shown. The catalogue, takes you through the exhibition with numerous installation shots (including the vitrines for all of the Cremaster films) and texts; there are also interviews with Barney himself and composer Jonathan Bepler who creates the scores for Barney’s work. The catalogue itself is very different to the standard format Barney uses. The edges of the book are dyed turquoise and the covers are wrapped in silk with the title stamped on. The book was limited to a few thousand copies but is still available at many online bookshops.

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Pace Car for the Hubris Pill is a catalogue that was designed by Matthew Barney to accompany his exhibition of the same name that toured Europe in ’95-96. The exhibition included his well known films Cremaster 1, Cremaster 4 and Drawing Restraint 7 alongside lesser known earlier works OTTOshaft, Facility of Incline and Facility of Decline. As with many of Barney’s books, it included stills from the films alongside associated drawing and sculptures. The book contained a number of gatefold pages and the book was held inside a screenprinted vinyl casing, a common feature of many of Barney’s books. The print run was limited to 2500 copies, making the book highly collectible.

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Up until his death in 2011 aged 89, the British artist Richard Hamilton continued to create arresting works in the Pop Art style, of which he was at the forefront. In 2010, he had a retrospective of his more political works at The Serpentine Gallery; to accompany the exhibition, Hamilton raffled off works from a series called Polaroid Portraits. I had not come across these works before but managed to get hold of one for my art collection. At the raffle Hamilton explained the Polaroid project and gave an insightful view in to his past. The project, in essence, was a real time photographic autobiography of his life through the medium of Polaroid photos and was exhibited in full at the IKON gallery in 2001. Starting in 1968, Hamilton asked artists he met to take his picture using a polaroid camera. Once he had collected 32, they were published in a volume, the first being in 1972. These books were small and devoid of text other than the name of the artist taking the picture and the year it was taken. On the cover was a list of all the artists contained in the book. The project eventually ran to four volumes, with the final volume being published in 2002, the artist list reads like a Who’s Who of 20th century art and includes artists such as Warhol, Baldessari, Bacon, Beuys, Lichtenstein and Oldenburg to name just a few. Journeying through these evocative portraits, you get a glimpse into his life and his love for art in all its forms. After the raffle at The Serpentine, I managed to track down and buy all four volumes of the series, some are easier to find than others.

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Ed Ruscha

Gerhard Richter

Andy Warhol

Jasper Johns

John Baldessari

Christian Boltanski

Robert Rauschenburg

Gustav Metzger

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Following the tragic death of Alexander McQueen in 2010, long time collaborators Visionaire dedicated a whole issue to his genius. Inside a satin covered case, embellished with metal brocade from the S/S10 collection, are a selection of images created by some of the most respected artists in the art and fashion world such as Lamsweerde and Matadin, Mert and Marcus, Mario Testino, Steven Klein and Nick Knight. Some of the images included are reproduced from previous issues McQueen collaborated on, such as the lenticular cover for Visionaire 27 of Kate Moss on a swing. The remaining images are printed on paper embedded with wildflower seeds so that if you were crazy enough to plant the pages and water them, the pages would blossom. The issue was limited to just 1500 copies, one of the smallest print runs Visionaire does, and sold out immediately.

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Jean-Paul Goude recently had a career retrospective exhibition at Les Arts Decoratifs that cemented his reputation as a photographer, illustrator, graphic designer and creative director. He began his career in the 60’s working as an illustrator for Printemps department stores before quickly progressing to become the art director for Esquire magazine in 1970. From here his fame and notoriety for creating groundbreaking imagery grew; he produced some of the most iconic and memorable editorial and commercial images of the 70’s and 80’s, including his unforgettable work with Grace Jones.

In 1983, he published Jungle Fever, a pictorial autobiography of his career to date. In the book, Goude divides his work in to chapters that show a clear progression in his work; sketches, works in progress and mock-ups are shown alongside the finished images to show how the image developed from concept to reality. Accompanying each chapter is an essay that describes the ideas behind the projects and also gives brief insights in to how his personal life and beliefs informed his work. The book clearly documents Goude’s interest in New York’s nightlife and the characters associated with it at a time when disco and clubs such as Studio 54 exploded on to the scene; it also shows Goude’s obsession with the female form and his use of collage and post-production to accentuate or contort his subjects in to impossible poses. The largest section of the book is of course dedicated to his work with Grace Jones, here we see the development of their working and personal relationship and how they created images and stage shows that are still referenced (and often unashamedly appropriated) to this day.

Jungle Fever has since become a seminal book in the fashion and editorial world with many artists and perfomers referencing it as a key inspiration for their work. The book is out of print and highly collectible; I was lucky enough to meet Goude a few years ago and he inscribed my copy.

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Matthew Barney produced Drawing Restraint 7 in 1993 as a three channel video installation. In the video, three satyrs travel in a limousine through the tunnels of New York; in the front seat a hairless kid satyr chases its own tail, whilst in the back a ram and a ewe satyr wrestle each other. The concept of a drawing restraint is embodied by the fighting satyrs battling to try and use each others horns to draw an image of themselves in the condensation on the cars sunroof. The video comes to a head when the satyrs and the car upholstery are flayed, a final punishment for an act of hubris (a recurring motif in much of Barney’s work); trying to recreate their own image. The video, along with drawings and photographs associated with the project, was shown at the 1993 Venice Biennale where Barney won the Aperto prize for his work. The catalogue to accompany the project was published by HatjeCantz and has since sold out.

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Cremaster 1 was the second film in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle to be produced, created one year after Cremaster 4 which I have previously covered. The stage for this film is the Bronco Stadium in Boise Idaho, Barney’s hometown. In this film, a troupe of dancers stand on the bright blue AstroTurf of the playing field whilst two blimps fly overhead. In each blimp are four air hostesses that sit and tend to a table covered in grapes with a sculpture at it’s centre. Underneath each table resides the Goodyear character, occupying both blimps at the same time. From beneath the tables Goodyear starts to pry a hole in the tabletop, through which she collects the grapes. As the grapes fall to the ground, the camera switches to the playing field below where the dancers recreate the pattern formed by the grapes in the blimps above. As the pattern of the grapes shifts, so too do the dancers. As the grapes and chorus girls form the field emblem of the Cremaster Cycle, Goodyear appears on the field holding two smaller blimps, the dancers then change formation to depict the undifferentiated gonadal state that is reinforced by the blimps above and the sculptures on the tables.

The catalogue accompanying the film was produced by Kunsthalle Wien and is now out of print. The book contains numerous stills from the film along with images of drawings and sculptures associated with the project.

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In 2002, San Francisco MOMA, in collaboration with Elisabeth Sussman, presented a retrospective of the work of German-born artist Eva Hesse. Hesse, born in 1936, migrated to the USA with her family in 1939 to escape Nazi Germany and settled in New York where she went on to study study art at a number of top institutes. After graduating from Yale she continued to develop her work and in 1963 had her first exhibition of works on paper. It was soon after this, following a move to Germany, that Hesse began creating sculptures, the medium for which she has become most known for. Her sculptural work, focusing on the use of latex, cloth, cord and fibre glass, continued up until her untimely death from a brain tumour in 1970, aged 34. During her short life she only ever had one one-person show of her sculptural works; it is only since her death that her genius and flair have been brought to the attention of a wider audience.

In perhaps the most seminal show of her work to date, the 2002 exhibition at SFMOMA exhibited not only her sculptural works but also her paintings and drawings which she continued to produce throughout her life. The exhibition brought together 150 pieces of her work and gave a fascinating insight into her body of work. After being exhibited at SFMOMA, the exhibition moved on to Germany and then Tate Modern in the UK. Due to the materials Hesse used for her sculptures, they are incredibly fragile and difficult to preserve; I imagine that it is unlikely there will ever be another exhibition of her work of this magnitude due to the logistical problems of transporting such delicate pieces. SFMOMA produced an in-depth catalogue of the exhibition that detailed all the works shown and gave a fascinating insight in to the life of the artist. In addition, it also discussed the difficulties in conserving Hesse’s work and how it might be preserved so that future generations can continue to enjoy her work. The catalogue is now out of print and is getting harder and harder to find.